The Little Friend (30 page)

Allison’s feet were very heavy. Suddenly—violently—they twitched. Harriet glanced up and saw Allison’s eyelids fluttering. She was dreaming. Quickly, Harriet seized her little toe and wrenched it backward, and Allison yelped and yanked her foot up to her body like a stork.

“What are you dreaming about?” demanded Harriet.

Allison—red waffle-patterns from the sofa stamped upon her cheek—turned her sleep-dulled eyes as if she didn’t recognize her
 … no, not quite
, thought Harriet, observing her sister’s confusion with keen, clinical detachment.
It’s like she sees me and something else
.

Allison cupped both hands over her eyes. She lay there like that for a moment, very still, and then she stood. Her cheeks were puffy, her eyelids heavy and inscrutable.

“You
were
dreaming,” said Harriet, watching her closely.

Allison yawned. Then—rubbing her eyes—she trudged towards the stairs, swaying sleepily as she walked.

“Wait!” cried Harriet. “What were you dreaming? Tell me.”

“I can’t.”

“What do you mean you can’t? You mean you
won’t.
”

Allison turned and looked at her—strangely, Harriet thought.

“I don’t want it to come true,” she said, starting upstairs.

“Don’t want
what
to come true?”

“What I just dreamed.”

“What was it? Was it about Robin?”

Allison stopped on the bottom step and looked back. “No,” she said, “it was about you.”

————

“That was only fifty-nine seconds,” said Harriet, coldly, over Pemberton’s coughs and splutters.

Pem grasped the side of the pool and wiped his eyes with
his forearm. “Bullshit,” he said, between gasps. He was maroon in the face, practically the color of Harriet’s penny loafers. “You were counting too slow.”

Harriet, with a long, angry whoosh, blew out all the air in her lungs. She breathed deep and hard, a dozen times, until her head began to whirl, and at the top of the last breath she dove and kicked off.

The way across was easy. On the return trip, through the chill blue tiger-stripes of light, everything thickened and ground down to slow motion—some kid’s arm floating past, dreamy and corpse-white; some kid’s leg, tiny white bubbles clinging to the leg hairs standing on end and rolling away with a slow, foamy kick as her blood crashed hard in her temples, and washed back, and crashed hard and washed back and crashed again, like ocean waves pounding on the beach. Up above—hard to imagine it—life clattered on in brilliant color, at high temperature and speed. Kids shouting, feet slapping on hot pavement, kids huddled with soggy towels around their shoulders and slurping on blue Popsicles the color of pool water. Bomb Pops, they were called. Bomb Pops. They were the fad, the favorite treat that year. Shivering penguins on the cold case at the concession stand. Blue lips … blue tongues … shivers and shivers and chattering teeth,
cold …

She burst through the surface with a deafening crack, as if through a pane of glass; the water was shallow but not quite shallow enough for her to stand in and she hopped about on tiptoe, gasping, as Pemberton—who’d been observing with interest—hit the water smoothly and glided out to her.

Before she knew what was happening, he scooped her expertly off her feet and all of a sudden her ear was against his chest and she was looking up at the nicotine-yellow undersides of his teeth. His tawny smell—adult, foreign, and, to Harriet, not wholly pleasant—was sharp even over the pool chemicals.

Harriet rolled out of his arms and they fell away from each other—Pemberton on his back, with a solid thwack that threw up a sheet of water as Harriet splashed to the side and clambered up, rather ostentatiously, in her yellow-and-black-striped
bathing suit that (Libby said) made her look like a bumblebee.

“What? Don’t you like to be picked up?”

His tone was lordly, affectionate, as if she was a kitten who’d scratched him. Harriet scowled and kicked a spray of water into his face.

Pem ducked. “What’s the matter?” he said teasingly. He knew very well—irritatingly well—how handsome he was, with his superior smile and his marigold-colored hair streaming out behind him in the blue water, like the laughing merman in Edie’s illustrated Tennyson:

“Hmmn?” Pemberton let go her ankle and splashed her, lightly, then shook his head so that the drops flew. “Where’s my money?”

“What money?” said Harriet, startled.

“I taught you how to hyperventilate, didn’t I? Just like they tell scuba divers to do in those expensive courses.”

“Yes, but that’s all you told me. I practice holding my breath every day.”

Pem drew back, looking pained. “I thought we had a deal, Harriet.”

“No we don’t!” said Harriet, who couldn’t bear to be teased.

Pem laughed. “Forget it. I ought to be paying
you
for lessons. Listen—” he dipped his head in the water, then bobbed up again—“is your sister still bummed out about that cat?”

“I guess. Why?” said Harriet, rather suspiciously. Pem’s interest in Allison made no sense to her.

“She ought to get a dog. Dogs can learn tricks but you can’t teach a cat to do anything. They don’t give a shit.”

“Neither does she.”

Pemberton laughed. “Well then, I think a puppy is just
what she needs,” he said. “There’s a notice in the clubhouse about some chow-chow puppies for sale.”

“She’d rather have a cat.”

“Has she ever had a dog?”

“No.”

“Well, then. She doesn’t know what she’s missing. Cats
look
like they know what’s going on, but all they do is sit around and stare.”

“Not Weenie. He was a genius.”

“Sure he was.”

“No, really. He understood every word we said. And he
tried to talk to us
. Allison worked with him all the time. He did the best he could but his mouth was just too different and the sounds didn’t come out right.”

“I bet they didn’t,” said Pemberton, rolling over to float on his back. His eyes were the same bright blue as the pool water.

“He did learn a few words.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“Like ‘nose.’ ”

“
Nose?
That’s a weird word to teach him,” said Pemberton idly, looking up at the sky, his yellow hair spread out like a fan on the surface of the water.

“She wanted to start with names of things, things she could point to. Like Miss Sullivan with Helen Keller. She’d touch Weenie’s nose, and say: ‘Nose! That’s your nose! You’ve got a
nose!
’ Then she’d touch her own nose. Then his again. Back and forth.”

“She must not have had much to do.”

“Well, she didn’t really. They’d sit there all afternoon. And after a while all Allison had to do was touch her nose and Weenie would reach up like this with his paw and touch his own nose and—
I’m not kidding,
” she said, over Pemberton’s loud derision—“no, really, he would make a weird little meow like he was trying to say ‘nose.’ ”

Pemberton rolled over on his stomach and resurfaced with a splash. “Come on.”

“It’s true. Ask Allison.”

Pem looked bored. “Just because he made a noise …”

“Yes, but it wasn’t any old noise.” She cleared her throat and tried to imitate the sound.

“You don’t expect me to believe that.”

“She has it on tape! Allison recorded a bunch of tapes of him! Most of it just sounds like plain old meows but if you listen hard you can really hear him saying a couple of words in there.”

“Harriet, you crack me up.”

“It’s the truth. Ask Ida Rhew. And he could tell time, too. Every afternoon at two-forty-five on the dot he scratched on the back door for Ida to let him out so he could meet Allison’s bus.”

Pemberton bobbed under the water to slick his hair back, then pinched his nostrils shut and blew, noisily, to clear his ears. “How come Ida Rhew doesn’t like me?” he said cheerfully.

“I don’t know.”

“She never has liked me. She was always mean to me when I came over to play with Robin, even when I was in kindergarten. She would pick a switch off one of those bushes you have out back there and chase my little ass all over the yard.”

“She doesn’t like Hely, either.”

Pemberton sneezed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “What’s going on with you and Hely, anyway? Is he not your boyfriend any more?”

Harriet was horrified. “He never was my boyfriend.”

“That’s not what he says.”

Harriet kept her mouth shut. Hely got provoked and shouted out things he didn’t mean when Pemberton pulled this trick, but she wasn’t going to fall for it.

————

Hely’s mother, Martha Price Hull—who had gone to high school with Harriet’s mother—was notorious for spoiling her sons rotten. She adored them frantically, and allowed them to do exactly as they pleased, never mind what their father had to say; and though it was too soon to tell with Hely, this indulgence was thought to be the reason why Pemberton had
turned out so disappointingly. Her fond child-rearing methods were legend. Grandmothers and mothers-in-law always pulled out Martha Price and her boys as a cautionary example to doting young mothers, of the heavy grievance someday to fall if (for instance) one allowed one’s child for three whole years to refuse all food but chocolate pie, as Pemberton had been famously permitted to do. From the ages of four to seven, Pemberton had eaten no food but chocolate pie: moreover (it was stressed, grimly) a
special kind
of chocolate pie, which called for condensed milk and all sorts of costly ingredients, and which doting Martha Price had been forced to rise at six a.m. daily in order to bake. The aunts still talked about an occasion when Pem—a guest of Robin’s—had refused lunch at Libby’s house, beating on the table with his fists (“like King Henry the Eighth”) demanding chocolate pie. (“Can you imagine?
‘Mama gives me chocolate pie.’
” “I would have given him a good whipping.”) That Pemberton had grown to adulthood enjoying a full head of teeth was a miracle; but his lack of industry and gainful employment were fully explainable, all felt, by this early catastrophe.

It was often speculated what a bitter embarrassment Pem’s father must find his eldest son, since he was the headmaster of Alexandria Academy and disciplining young people was his job. Mr. Hull was not the shouting, red-faced ex-athlete customary at private academies like Alexandria; he was not even a coach: he taught science to junior-high-school students, and spent the rest of his time in his office with the door shut, reading books on aeronautical engineering. But though Mr. Hull held the school under tight control, and students were terrified by his silences, his wife undercut his authority at home and he had a tough time keeping order with his own boys—Pemberton in particular, who was always joking and smirking and making rabbit ears behind his father’s head when the group photographs were taken. Parents sympathized with Mr. Hull; it was clear to everyone that nothing short of knocking the boy unconscious was going to shut him up; and though the withering way he barked at Pemberton on public occasions made everyone in the room nervous, Pem himself seemed not bothered by it in the slightest,
and kept right up with the easy wisecracks and smart remarks.

But though Martha Hull did not mind if her sons ran all over town, grew their hair past their shoulders, drank wine with dinner or ate dessert for breakfast, a few rules in the Hull household were inviolable. Pemberton, though twenty, was not allowed to smoke in his mother’s presence; and Hely, of course, not at all. Loud rock-and-roll music on the hi-fi was forbidden (though when his parents were out, Pemberton and his friends blasted the Who and the Rolling Stones across the entire neighborhood—to Charlotte’s befuddlement, Mrs. Fountain’s complaints, and Edie’s volcanic rage). And while neither parent could now stop Pemberton from going anywhere he pleased, Hely was forbidden at all times Pine Hill (a bad section of town, with pawn shops and juke joints) and the Pool Hall.

It was the Pool Hall where Hely—still in his sulk over Harriet—now found himself. He had parked his bicycle down the street, in the alley by the City Hall, in case his mother or father happened to drive by. Now he stood morosely crunching barbecued potato chips—which were sold along with cigarettes and gum at the dusty counter—and browsing through the comic books at the rack by the door.

Though the Pool Hall was only a block or two from the town square, and had no liquor license, it was nonetheless the roughest place in Alexandria, worse even than the Black Door or the Esquire Lounge over in Pine Hill. Dope was said to be sold at the Pool Hall; gambling was rampant; it was the site of numerous shootings and slashings and mysterious fires. Poorly lit, with cinder-block walls painted prison green, and fluorescent tubes flickering on the foam-panelled ceiling, it was on this afternoon fairly empty. Of the six tables, only two were in use, and a couple of country boys with slicked hair and snap-front denim shirts played a subdued game of pinball in the back.

Though the Pool Hall’s mildewy, depraved atmosphere appealed to Hely’s sense of desperation, he did not know how to play pool, and he was scared to loiter near the tables and
watch. But he felt invigorated just to stand by the door, unnoticed, munching his barbecued potato chips and breathing the same perilous ozone of corruption.

What drew Hely to the Pool Hall were the comic books. Their selection was the best in town. The drugstore carried Richie Rich, and Betty and Veronica; the Big Star grocery had all these and Superman, too (on a rack situated uncomfortably, by the rotisserie chicken, so that Hely couldn’t browse too long without thoroughly roasting his ass); but the Pool Hall had Sergeant Rock and
Weird War Tales
and
G.I. Combat
(real soldiers killing real gooks); they had Rima the Jungle Girl in her panther-fur bathing suit; best of all, they had a rich selection of horror comics (werewolves, premature burials, drooling carrions shuffling forth from the graveyard), all of which were, to Hely, of unbelievably riveting interest:
Weird Mystery Tales
and
House of Secrets, The Witching Hour
and
The Specter’s Notebook
and
Forbidden Tales of the Dark Mansion.…
He had not been aware that such galvanizing reading matter existed—much less that it was available for him, Hely, to purchase in his own town—until one afternoon, when he had been forced to stay after school, he had discovered in an empty desk a copy of
Secrets of Sinister House
. On its cover was a picture of a crippled girl in a creepy old house, screaming and frantically trying to roll her wheelchair away from a giant cobra. Inside, the crippled girl perished in a froth of convulsions. And there was more—vampires, gouged eyes, fratricides. Hely was enthralled. He read it five or six times from cover to cover, and then took it home and read it some more until he knew it backwards and forward by heart, every single story—“Satan’s Roommate,” “Come Share My Coffin,” “Transylvania Travel Agency.” It was without question the greatest comic book he had ever seen; he believed it to be one of a kind, some marvelous fluke of nature, unobtainable, and he was beside himself when some weeks later he saw a kid at school named Benny Landreth reading one quite similar, this one called
Black Magic
with a picture of a mummy strangling an archaeologist on the cover. He pleaded with Benny—who was a grade older, and mean—to sell the comic to him; and
then, when that didn’t work, he offered to pay Benny two dollars and then three if Benny would only let him look at the comic for a minute, just one minute.